Quick Guide to Salesforce Service Offering
Today, Salesforce offers a range of products that interconnects a business across marketing, sales, service, commerce, and IT teams to build a 360o view around customers. Unfortunately, the number of product options available to a user can become a cause of confusion for someone just getting familiar with the platform. Therefore, before you delve deeper into the specifics, having a good understanding of the different services each Salesforce product offers can make your learning path smoother and more straightforward.
Following our discussion of Salesforce architecture in the last installment, we will tackle the problem of different Salesforce service offerings in this fifth part of our Salesforce Tutorial series.
On that note, let’s get started with the most popular offering in Salesforce’s product pool, Sales Cloud.
Sales Cloud
Sales Cloud is geared towards assisting sales teams throughout their work cycle. The product contains tools to record customer contacts, manage leads, design sales campaigns, trigger emails, and generate reports as necessary. It supports the automation of many of these tasks to help sales teams save time and effort.
For example, you can use the Sales Cloud to record the details of the leads generated through a marketing campaign. You can then create a set of tasks to follow up on the leads and assign members to handle them promptly. If a lead turns into a customer, you can record their details through the platform and monitor their behavior over time with the help of analytics.
Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud provides tools to manage your attempts towards connecting with customers and other interested parties. It offers support for conducting marketing campaigns and customer interactions via email, SMS, social media, advertising, or other digital platforms. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, the platform also predicts the best-suited marketing approaches to reach different types of consumers based on the data collected through these channels.
Both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud can be easily integrated with the Marketing Cloud. It gives the chance to marketing teams to build a complete picture of customers’ interactions with the business, which in turn, increases the accuracy of targeted marketing campaigns carried out through the platform.
Marketing Cloud is not a single product but a collection of separate units on an internal level. These individual units belonging to the platform include:
- Pardot: A B2B marketing solution that supports email marketing campaigns integrated with analytics features.
- Journey Builder: A B2C marketing solution that develops personalized marketing journeys for customers via numerous channels, including email, social media, and SMS.
- Customer 360o Audiences: This is where you can build a 360o view of customers by integrating data from outside sources such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.
- Social Studio: A platform for connecting to your social media channels. You can publish content, engage with the audience, and analyze audience behavior through it.
- Loyalty Management: A place to create, track, and manage loyalty programs.
Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud offers a platform for customer service teams to handle customer issues and inquiries with customized, automated workflows. The product enables you to track the progression of cases in one place while gaining a complete view of customer interactions with the business via Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud integrations.
Examples of support channels you can open up through the Service Cloud include email, live chat, and telephone. Since the inquiries made are tied to each customer’s identity, no data loss occurs even if the customer uses different channels to contact the service team over time.
Analytics Cloud
In an age data is becoming increasingly powerful, the Analytics Cloud provides you a platform to make data-driven decisions.
Today, Tableau, a product acquired by Salesforce in 2019, acts as the main component in the Analytics Cloud. Tableau supports creating customized dashboards, seamlessly integrating with other salesforce products, and importing data from outside sources to draw insights on your business operations and customer relations.
Tableau’s AI-powered analytical algorithms enhance the platform’s ability to make accurate predictions and forecasts, improving the value of your data tenfold compared to traditional practices.
Salesforce Platform
Salesforce Platform, previously known as Force.com, is the core application development solution in the Salesforce marketplace. It provides facilities to add customized features to other Salesforce products. You can also build new apps to address your unique needs and immediately deploy them through the Salesforce Platform.
This product comes with a low-code development environment where you can simply assemble components to build applications. Those familiar with the technical side of app development can use the more advanced features provided by Platform, such as Apex, Javascript, and Lightning integrations, to create versatile applications.
Commerce Cloud
Commerce Cloud allows businesses to create online shopping experiences for products and services as quickly as possible. Salesforce CMS integrated into the platform offer hundreds of off-the-shelf components required to build online marketplaces to attract customers.
With the introduction of AI-powered features, you can provide personalized experiences to your customers based on their preferences as recorded across different Salesforce platforms such as Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud.
Experience Cloud
Previously known as the Community Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud provides tools to create targeted platforms for your customers, partners, or employees to interact with the business. It includes forums, help centers, or portals to offer a community experience to stakeholders.
Even a person with no experience in programming can rely on the Experience Cloud’s low-code environment to design high-quality interactive platforms with drag-and-drop components.
Industry Cloud
With the Industry Cloud, Salesforce focuses on providing industry-specific solutions to customers. Financial Services, Healthcare, and Public Sector are some industries Salesforce has paid attention to in recent years.
These service offerings take Salesforce’s core CRM tools and tailor them to industry-specific requirements. This is why Healthcare solutions introduce Families and Patients as core objects instead of Accounts and Contacts as in standard Salesforce products. We can see a similar scenario in Financial Service offerings where Financial Holdings and Assets have replaced Opportunities and Products.
Recently, Salesforce acquired Vlocity to expand its industry-specific services to more sectors, including Communication, Transportation, and Education.
What’s next?
With that, we finish our introduction to Salesforce service offerings in this chapter. In the next installment of our Salesforce tutorial series, we are going to discuss the core features of the Salesforce platform in detail.
If what you’ve learned so far has sparked your curiosity to pursue a career in Salesforce, it’s time to remind you about our Salesforce training program. We have gathered a set of industry experts to guide you to gain Salesforce experience through hands-on lessons. Our training program will equip you with the knowledge to acquire Salesforce certification, Salesforce interview questions and start a career in the industry as quickly as possible.
